Features of Informality in Applied Linguistics Research Articles Published in Iranian Local Journals

Abstract

This study was motivated by the recent study on informality in academic writing carried out by Hyland and Jiang (2017), to see the status of informality in Applied Linguistics research articles published in Iranian local journals. To this end, 50 research articles from two Journals of “Research in Applied Linguistics” and “Iranian Journal of applied Linguistics” were selected. The research articles were published in 2014 and 2015 issues. They were analyzed based on Hyland and Jiang’s (2017) taxonomy. The results imply that unattended anaphoric pronouns and sentence initial conjunctions have received the greatest attention from Iranian writers of Applied Linguistics writers while exclamations and contractions were totally ignored. Compared to the results reported by Hyland and Jiang (2017), the use of features of informality by Iranian writers of the present study varies to a great extent. The variations could stress the necessity of awareness of Iranian Applied Linguistics and related fields of study writers concerning the use of these features by successful writers.

Keywords

• genre
• informality features
• iranian writers
• local journals
• research article